Xavier Guardans: Windows

In 2006, photographer Xavier Guardans traveled Kenya, exploring the wilderness and making portraits of various tribespeople through the window of his Toyota Land Cruiser 4x4. In Windows, a new monograph collecting these photographs, essayist Amanda Schmitt writes, "Guardans does not document the lives or culture of a people whose traditions are slowly disappearing. He explores the human essence of a people whose culture has increasingly been exploited by generations of photographers as a circus for tourists. His aim was not to capture an image and bring it back as a sort of evidence or documentation of a culture, but rather to connect and to present these people, figuratively through a different lens and literally through a different frame. His creation, his world, is both dark and light expressed elegantly through his choice of black and white film for such a colorful nation as Kenya. The balance in these energies is palpable, both solid and ephemeral. Something so fixated and permanent has been built that a sort of truth rests in this place." Guardans will sign copies of the book at theInternational Center of Photography, New York, this Friday, March 21 at 6PM.